Mammals

Category archives for Mammals

Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)? This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The…

I know Marc Hauser, and I trust him. I worked with him for a few years as a colleague on the faculty in the Anthropology department on various administrative matters (such as graduate admission and undergraduate program development) and we taught together. We are very different kinds of people, and did not always see eye…

The newly reported Saadanius hijazensis may or may not be a “missing link” but in order for this monkey to climb onto the primate family tree, a new branch had to be sprouted. So, not only is Saadanius hijazensis a new species, but it is a member of a new taxonomic Family, Saadaniidae, which in…

In Robert Gardner’s documentary film Dead Birds, the men of a highland New Guinea village guard the perimeter of the territory, watchful for men of the neighboring group who may be intent on sneaking into the gardens to capture and kill an unwitting child or woman in order to avenge a prior death. But they…

Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in “monkeynomics” shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

Park mangers say they euthanized “an aggressive, habituated, and human-food-conditioned black bear” Tuesday out of “concern for visitor safety.” But it was also a result of stupid people making unnatural food available to the bear. The adult female bear had been seen frequenting the Slough Creek area in the park’s north central area. The bear…

Does your back yard slope up, away from your house, or does it slope down? The likelihood that your yard slopes one way or the other … statistically … depends in large part on what region you live in. (Here I’ll be speaking mainly of the US, but the principle applies broadly.) If you live…